Count Me In

Perhaps an asterisk now that I'm eighty

My mother used to enlist me to help her wind skeins of yarn into balls. I would sit on the couch with my arms bent at the elbows and my hands held about fourteen inches apart, the loop of wool wound around each hand while she meditatively created compact tennis-size balls out of it. Then she would grab her knitting needles or her crochet hook and turn the soft sheep-donated stuff into a sweater. I still have a purple one she made me when I went off to college in 1962. It’s too small and I don’t much like it, but I would never throw it out. It’s a ritual object like candlesticks, like a challah cover and she touched it. My mother.

I didn’t sleep for six months after she died on November 8, 2006, 17 Cheshvan on the Hebrew calendar. I had wanted to be with her but we both had the flu which was going around in the nursing home in Berkeley where her 99 year old body lay frail and bruised. I had been out there visiting her about ten days before and came home feverish and hacking. I couldn’t travel when my sister called to say our mother was dying. In the end, my last moments with her unfolded on the phone, both of us viral and struggling to breathe. I didn’t see her. I didn’t hold her hand. A week or so later when I was feeling better, we had a little memorial service in my sister’s living room, but it was too late for me. The yarn was tangled, the thread was unspooled. I couldn’t collect myself and make it right.

Photo by Margarida Afonso on Unsplash

I have been swimming in the same waters this week. On Friday, I’ll be tuning in to an online celebration of life to remember my brother-in-law Joe who died in Fort Myers two weeks ago. Almost no one is flying to Florida for this event. Travel is an appalling experience, what with unpaid air traffic controllers, delays, and cancellations. No one wants to go. The service will be live streamed so we will be able to see the speakers, but they won’t be able to see us. The disconnect of pandemic era funerals will prevail. Just as I didn’t see my mother before she died, I will not see the gathered family at the service for Joe. I will not be part of the circle of living and dying that glues us to one another, softening and mediating the dismay of loss. Frank and I will be staring at a monitor, hoping there are no tech glitches, wanting to hug and be hugged but disembodied, severed from the great chain of being, edited out of the story.

All week, I felt like a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle laid out on a card table. I couldn’t put myself together. I couldn’t find the colors for the border, the corners. At first I was frantic, talking at people superfast like a deranged auctioneer. I couldn’t focus. Then yesterday, my engine ran out of gas and I just stopped. I felt like I was being led around with a bag over my head like a prisoner at Abu Graib. Nothing registered. All this unfolding in the stench of a world gone bad, the promise of Mamdani notwithstanding. On any given day, I am confronted by my own mortality and a grab bag of opportunities to worry about my impending frailty. What exactly is that pins-and-needles sensation in my left forearm? My doctor mentions neuropathy, an irritation of the nerve endings. It is my nature, as the Buddhists say, to get old, to get sick, and to die, but I’m not always up for it. I have been fortunate in my health to date so the inevitable decline has not done me in yet. On the other hand, you better believe my nerve endings are irritated. I am now an eighty-year old citizen of a regime with its foot on the totalitarian gas pedal.

The private rituals of passage are more important to me than ever. I want to be present in the flesh at every wedding, every funeral, every b’nai mitzvah, bris, and first communion I can get myself invited to. I want to sit at the deathbeds of all my loved ones and wind the yarn of their life to let them know that we are woven together and that memory will continue to connect us and blanket us in love.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from your local bookseller.